Media Dojo

Archive for August, 2011

Guilty as charged for light posting over the summer. We’re moving from Whidbey Island to Bellevue which has sucked 99% of processing cycles out of nearly every waking moment.

However, I did find time this morning to attend a webinar focusing on the new Certificate in Cloud Computing offered by the University of Washington’s School of Professional and Continuing Education. It’s a nine month course conducted in-class and online with a cap of around 40 students that terminates with a UW certificate. The curriculum was developed by the UW Dept. of Computer Science & Engineering under the guidance of the eScience Institute.

In a nutshell, there are three courses that start with a broad overview of cloud computing in the autumn, a winter quarter emphasis on the tools and services, and a spring quarter course that drills into Big Data. The instructors Rusty Chapin, Anthony Stevens and Bill Howe are drawn from industry and UW. Between the three courses, the goal is to go the next step beyond “this is the cloud” programs in many schools. Aside from UW, Cal State Fullerton is one of the very few offering a more hands-on certificate in cloud computing.

When you parse the curriculum to its essentials, there is a focusing on handling data more than handling applications. While some might feel that concentrating mainly on tools and Big Data limit the UW program, the trade-off (after all, the whole thing is nine months) seems reasonable to me. Data dominance is the new high ground for a lot of business competition. The cloud has largely removed access to data processing infrastructure as a barrier to entry. Virtually no start-up in their right mind uses their seed or series A capital to build a data center. Simultaneously, there’s no large organization that isn’t exploring its options for migrating some of its data processing operations to cloud-based infrastructure. Given that dynamic, one can expect the UW program to be heavily subscribed but also ripe for modification once it starts serving actual students.

Interested people can attend an information session next month September 8 in downtown Seattle.

DISCLOSURE: Currently, I’m teaching a course on transmedia design in the Master of Communications in Digital Media program at UW. There is no direct connection between these two programs.